Elizabeth Holt

Wednesday, 13 April 2016, 5.00 pm - 6.30 pm |
Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin

Palestine, Propaganda and Resistance Literature in the Cold War


Elizabeth M. Holt

(Bard College / EUME Fellow 2015/16)

Chair: Refqa Abu-Remaileh
(EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung 2014-16)

Abstract
In the months leading up to the first issue of the new Arabic literary journal Hiwar in the fall of 1962, editor Tawfiq Sayigh argued with Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) representatives at their Paris headquarters about the role that Palestine would play in the journal's Arab nationalist aesthetics and politics.  For Sayigh, the fact that Hiwar published the work of Palestinian historian Walid al-Khalidi proved that the CCF was not worthy of the suspicion of cultural imperialism that the Arab press directed at it. Ghassan Kanafani, Palestinian novelist, newspaper editor, theorist of adabal-muqawamah (or resistance literature), and friend of Sayigh, stood as one of the CCF's most articulate critics even after its collapse in 1966/7, when the CCF was revealed to be a covert CIA Cold War operation. Through a reading of Kanafani's literary criticism and his novel Returning to Haifa (1969), this lecture argues for the necessity of understanding the Palestinian literary and intellectual scene in the 1960s within a wider global frame attentive to the fate of Arabic in the Cold War.

Elizabeth M. Holt received her PhD in Middle East and Asian Languages and Culture, and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 2009. She is Assistant Professor of Arabic in the Division of Languages and Literature at Bard College, a small liberal arts college in the hamlet of Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where Holt teaches courses in Arabic language, Arabic literature, world literature and translation, literary theory, and Middle Eastern Studies. Holt serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Arabic Literature, a journal she has edited since 2008. Holt's first book Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel is forthcoming in 2017 with Fordham University Press. Fictitious Capital reads an archive of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century periodicals, letters, first editions and private papers in Arabic and French, revealing how finance and the novel at once tell the other's story, a plotline of serialized hope and fear charted in the journals of Beirut through the silk market, and meted out in Cairo in cotton shares. Research for the book was supported by a post-doctoral fellowship at the American Research Center in Egypt through the National Endowment for the Humanities.
As a EUME fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin's Freidrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies, Holt is working on her second book, a history of Arabic literature in the Cold War told through the CIA-founded and -funded Congress for Cultural Freedom's Arabic journal Hiwar.